Canada’s national museum of natural history is offering free online access to more than 710,000 records of plants, animals, fossils and minerals in its collection. The digitized records represent 22 per cent of the museum’s estimated 3.2 million units of biological and geological data.
“We’re really opening up the back doors of museums that really haven’t been accessible to the public certainly and to researchers in an easy way because you have to travel to get to different institutions. But by making the information available digitally it really opens up access,” says Jeff Saarela, research scientist at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa.
Scientists can use the data to, for example, track invasive species patterns, understand competition in ecosystems, map changes in habitat, and to help them with computer modelling on such issues as climate change.
Ordinary people may want to look up information about animals or plants where they live, or look at other data on other specimens they might be interested in.
The museum estimates in manages more than 10.5 million individual specimens acquired over more than 150 years, so the project to digitize the data will continue into the future.
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